The " third generation " of leadership under Jiang Zemin, Zhu Rongji, and associates largely continued Deng's progressive economic vision while overseeing the re-emergence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s.

Deng's ancestors can be traced back to Meixian County in Guangdong Province, a prominent ancestral area for the Hakka people, and had been settled in Sichuan for several generations.

At the time of his promotion, Li seened like an unusual choice for Premier because he did not seem to share Deng's enthusiasm for introducing market reforms.

Deng's return set the scene for a protracted factional struggle between the radical Gang of Four and moderates led by Zhou and Deng.

By late 1975 however, Mao saw that Deng's economic restructuring might negate the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and launched a campaign to oppose " rehabilitating the case for the rightists ", alluding to Deng as the country's foremost " rightist ".

On October 10, Deng Xiaoping personally wrote a letter to Hua asking to be transferred back to state and party affairs ; party elders also called for Deng's return.

Deng's belief, however, stipulated that the only solution to keeping the legitimacy of Communist rule over China was to continue the drive for modernization and economic reform, and therefore placed himself at odds with Jiang.

Yang's experiences with radical Maoism strengthened Yang's support for Deng's agenda of Chinese economic reform.

Chen laid the basis for Deng's " reform and opening " program.

Chen was not, in principle, opposed to the scope of Deng's reforms: China's economic policy had effectively frozen consumer prices for decades, to the point that prices in China no longer had much relationship to the relative value of resources, goods, or services.

One reason for Chen's ability to escape political persecution, especially in Mao's time, was his lack of will or ability to challenge the top leadership ( one of Deng's merits was that he did not subject his defeated critics to public abuse ).

Liu and Deng's relationship grew strong only after the communist takeover because both were discontent with Mao Zedong's disastrous policy such as Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution: As Liu was persecuted in the late 1950s, Deng showed his support to Liu, as the latter was making rounds of analyses and apologies for the so-called dogmatism and empiricism.

Similarly, Liu showed his support to Deng for Deng's economic policy in the early 1960s to rescue Chinese economy.

As noted above, Emperor Wen greatly favored Deng Tong, for no particular apparent reason, and he gave Deng much honor and wealth despite Deng's apparent lack of ability.

This proved a trigger for Deng's manoeuvre in 1978 to gain control of economic policy in China, and led eventually to Hua being demoted from the party leadership in 1980.

During a Politburo meeting in March 1977, many members voiced support for Deng's return, to no avail.

Deng's market socialism, especially in its early stages, was in some ways parallel to Lenin's New Economic Policy and Bukharin's economic policies, in that they all foresaw a role for private entrepreneurs and markets based on trade and pricing rather than government mandates of production.

The visit was not only Deng's last major public appearance, but also seen as a test for the direction of the new leadership.

Deng's renewed push for a market-oriented economy received official sanction at the 14th Party Congress later in the year as a number of younger, reform-minded leaders began their rise to top positions.

Deng's policies opened up the economy to foreign investment and market allocation within a socialist framework, and put into practice a daring and unprecedented system that allowed free enterprise and capitalist ideas to grow and compensate for each other under a single-party political system.

Perhaps realizing that opposition to capitalism would be poorly received by Deng and other Party elders, Li publicly supported Deng's economic reforms.

Some hold that the Revolution ' cleansed ' China from superstitions, religious dogma, and outdated traditions in a ' modernist transformation ' that later made Deng's economic reforms possible.

China scholars generally agree that Deng's interpretation of Maoism preserves the legitimacy of Communist rule in China but at the same time criticizes Mao's brand of economic and political governance.

This argument was decisively resolved in Deng's favor in late 1978, which is generally taken as the start of the era of Chinese economic reform.

Yang had a close friendship with Deng and shared many of Deng's long-term economic goals, but was far less enthusiastic about the agenda of political liberalization promoted by other senior leaders favoured by Deng, including Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Wan Li, and Hu Qili.

Yang's family benefited from Deng's economic reforms, and he was able to promote his children to important posts in several state-owned monopolies that the Chinese government founded to promote economic growth.

Chen's criticism of the Deng's economic reforms was influential within the Communist Party, and was reflected in the policies of China's leaders after Deng.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Deng's reforms included introduction of planned, centralized management of the macro-economy by technically proficient bureaucrats, abandoning Mao's mass campaign style of economic construction.

After the visit, the Communist Party Politburo publicly issued an endorsement of Deng's policies of economic openness.

Furthermore, by the mid-1990s most of the benefits of Deng's reforms, particularly in agriculture, had run their course ; rural incomes had become stagnant, leaving Deng's successors in search of new means to boost economic growth in rural areas, or else risk a massive social implosion.

Finally, Deng's policy of asserting the primacy of economic development, while maintaining the rule of the Communist Party, has raised questions about its legitimacy.

After 1989 Bo intervened numerous times to support Deng's efforts to re-start economic ( but not political ) liberalization, and to prevent economic hardliners from dominating Party politics.

Many economists have argued that the bottom-up approach of Deng's reforms, in contrast to the top-down approach of Perestroika, was a key factor in his success.

He was much less enthusiastic about the market than Deng Xiaoping and Deng's younger colleagues.

While Chen became the moral leader of the conservative opposition to Deng Xiaoping, he did not challenge Deng's personal primacy as head of regime.

Zhao Ziyang later wrote in his autobiography that, although Deng had stated many of these sentiments in a private conversation with Li Peng shortly before the editorial was written, Li had these comments disseminated to Party members and published as the editorial without Deng's knowledge or consent.

Deng's displacement of Hua Guofeng marked the Party leadership's consensus that China should abandon strict Maoist economics in favor of more pragmatic policies, and Hu directed many of Deng's attempts to reform the Chinese economy.

Although Deng Xiaoping was Zhao's only firm supporter among the Party elders, Deng's support was sufficient to protect Zhao throughout Zhao's career.

One of Deng's first political goals was to rehabilitate Party members who had been condemned and persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

The coalition of Hua's political supporters, bearing the name of " the whatever faction ", also lost its power after the Deng's political maneuver: Wang Dongxing, Ji Dengkui, Wu De, and Chen Xilian, the so-called " Little Gang of Four ", were relieved of all the Party and state posts during the 5th Plenum of the CC CCP, 23-39 February 1980.

Politically, however, Deng's experiment separating the governance of Party, Government and Military have proven to be a failed strategy under the current political system.